Domestic collect calls, i.e. those made entirely within the United States, are almost universally undergo automatic screening by a U.S. operator position to verify that the telephone station receiving the collect call is one that does not prohibit collect call billing. This automatic screening utilizes two databases which contain all of telephones numbers which are non-billable for collect calls. One of these databases is operated and maintained by the U.S. long distance company and the other database is operated and maintained by the local exchange company (LEC) of the region. These two databases are customized for each region of the United States in order to reflect the individual needs of each region. The best example of a number which is non-billable for collect calls a pay telephone. If a person at a pay telephone accepts a collect call, there is no mechanism for collecting the amount billed for the call from that person. To accept a collect call knowing that the call will not be paid is fraud on the telephone company providing the service. To reduce such fraud, at least one of the two databases contains the numbers of all the pay telephones for its region. At one time such a database was fairly simple because one or two ranges of exchange numbers were dedicated exclusively to pay telephones, such as NXX-8000 to NXX-8999 or NXX-9000 to NXX-9999. However, with growth in population density in some regions, the former dedicated ranges ceased to be dedicated exclusively to pay telephones and other ranges ceased to be exclusively non-pay telephones. At this point, there was no easy way to distinguish between non-pay and pay telephone numbers.
In addition to the pay telephone database(s), the regional LEC database contains numbers of other telephones in the region which are also non-billable for collect calls. An example of such a number would be a hospital or college, where a telephone is needed for business communications during normal business hours, but often it is hard to supervise who uses that telephone twenty-four hours a day. For such applications, hospitals, colleges and similar entities may prohibit the LEC from billing collect calls or similar operator assisted calls to such telephones. The regional LEC database is the responsibility of each LEC to maintain. By the nature of these telephone numbers, they are not restricted to any particular range.
Screening collect calls using both non-billable for collect calls databases, the pay telephone database and the regional LEC non-billable number database, effectively prevents fraudulent collect calls from being completed for domestic collect calls. Unfortunately, screening of collect calls assisted by foreign public telephone and telegraph (PTT) operators is processed differently than domestic collect calls. Foreign PTT operators historically used a collect call screening method based on a route bulletin. The route bulletin listed the ranges, for example NXX-8000-NXX-8999, in which the numbers of the pay telephones for a particular city or region were found. If a collect call was to a U.S. telephone number in a range listed in the route bulletin, the procedure required the foreign PTT operator to first verify with a U.S. long distance operator that the number is indeed a number to which a collect call could be billed. If the number was not verified as a number to which a collect call could be billed, the procedure required the foreign PTT operator to reject the collect call. If the number was verified as a number to which a collect call could be billed, or if the number was not in the ranges listed in the route bulletin, then the foreign PTT operator could place the collect call to a U.S. telephone number. When it reached the point in a particular region that pay telephones had come to have numbers in all or almost all possible ranges, this meant that the route bulletin procedure for that region required the foreign PTT operators to verify every collect call to that region with a U.S. long distance operator. At that point the procedure took too much time on the part of the foreign PTT operators. Additionally, verbally repeating every number of a collect call to a U.S. operator to be punched into the two databases for verification left too much room for error. Foreign PTT operators refused to verify every collect call to the U.S. with a U.S. long distance operator before placing the call into the international network. The international payment rules, however, charged the U.S. companies for the fraudulently completed, non-billable collect calls, and, although the percentage of non-billable collect calls was low, the PTT's refusal to verify resulted in very large losses to U.S. long distance and LEC companies.
As a compromise, the foreign PTF operators have agreed to follow the procedure of verifying collect calls to numbers in the non-billable for collect call number ranges (NXX-8000 to 8999 and NXX-9000 to 9999) as they used to, but they have not agreed to follow the procedure for collect calls to numbers in any other ranges. This means that foreign collect calls will not be screened for a good portion of the non-billable telephone numbers in the LEC database. Also, to the extent that there are not enough numbers in the 8000 and 9000 ranges for all of the pay telephones in a region, a portion of collect calls to known pay telephones will not be screened. Thus, there is a need in the art to replace the present procedure that uses a route bulletin with limited verification ranges with an efficient and dependable screening apparatus and method to reduce foreign incollect calls to telephone numbers which are non-billable for collect calls.